Delimited search

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In computing, delimited search refers to a simple search user interface allowing search in three steps:

Contents

This search mode is the default search system implemented in most operating systems, word processing systems, many online full-text search interfaces.

The contrary of delimited search is incremental search in which a user gets instant feedback as he/she types a query based on what may exist in the content searched, thereby allowing him/her to adjust the query based on actual coverage of the target content instead of waiting for the system to compute results and possibly returning a "not found" error.

Critique

The renowned interface design guru, Jef Raskin, defined delimited search and compared it to his more favorite search interface (incremental search). Here are his own words in his famous work, "The Human Interface":

"With a delimited search, the computer waits for the user to type a pattern and delimit it, after which it is the user who waits while the computer does the search. When using a delimited search the user must guess, beforehand, how much of a pattern the computer needs to distinguish the desired target from other, similar targets. With an incremental search, he can tell when he has typed enough to disambiguate the desired instance, because the target appeared on the display. (..) In spite of near agreement about the desirability of incremental searches on the part of both designers and users, almost all interface-building tools make it easy to implement delimited searches and difficult or impossible to implement incremental searches." [1]

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FLOW is an educational programming language designed by Jef Raskin and Jonathan (Jon) Collins, an undergraduate student in the UCSD Art Department, in 1970 and implemented on several minicomputers in the early 1970s. The goal of the language is to make it easy to explore algorithms through a highly interactive environment. The overall language is very similar in syntax and structure to the BASIC programming language, but has a number of changes in order to make typing code easier. Most notable among these was the concept of "typing amplification", in which short strings, often a single character, were expanded by the language into the complete "unamplified" source code. Modern integrated development environments and code-oriented text editors often include a similar feature, now normally referred to as autocomplete. The beginning programmer would first create a flow chart to solve the problem. Since the all of problems involved words the solution was intuitive. The flow chart would be translated into the flow programming language using a top-down, mechanical method.

References

  1. Raskin, Jef (2000-04-08). The Humane Interface . Addison-Wesley Professional. pp.  126. ISBN   978-0-201-37937-2. Read Text on Internet Archive